UNLV has $1.3 million reasons for Ohio State road trip

Thursday it was announced that Ohio State had scheduled a 2018 game against fellow Power Five member Oregon State. At the same time, it was also announced that OSU would play a 2017 game against UNLV.

Both of those games will be played in Ohio Stadium. While we don’t yet know the Beavers’ motive for the one-off game, we certainly know the Rebels’.

In a press release, UNLV confirmed that the football Rebels will travel to Columbus for a Sept. 23, 2017, game against the Buckeyes. The school also confirmed that the athletic department has been guaranteed $1.3 million from OSU for the game.

UNLV states that the $1.3 million guarantee is the program’s biggest payout ever. The sum that OSU trumps? The $1 million guarantee UNLV will receive for traveling to the Big House to face Michigan in 2015.

To UNLV’s credit, it didn’t sugarcoat that this is a paycheck game for what’s a non-Power Five football program searching for revenue streams anywhere and everywhere it can find it.

“We are looking at signing one guarantee game every couple of seasons and Ohio State is a great fit for 2017,” UNLV athletic director Tina Kunzer-Murphy said in a statement. “It will be an exciting trip for our team and fans for the Rebels to play at the famed Horseshoe.”

The Rebels already had games scheduled against Arkansas State and at Idaho for 2017 prior to the agreement with the Buckeyes.

On Ohio State’s scheduling end, and while they lost the North Carolina series in 2017 and 2018, OSU still has Oklahoma in 2017 (the back-end of a home-and-home, in Columbus) and TCU in 2018 (front-end of a home-and-home, in Fort Worth).